Tim:

Some people will always dismiss anything outside the conventional wisdom as nutty...but many people are simply waiting for social proof.  Thus the snowballing effect of most trends: the more people join a trend, the more other people feel comfortable joining it, because their threshold of social proof has been exceeded.

We're starting to see that with paleo: enough independent thinkers have been promoting it for long enough to give it some social proof, so not everyone views it as a "fringe" diet anymore.

JS

Andy:

Exactly.  When your diet consists mostly of cheese quesadillas and beer and you're still skinny, it's easy to convince yourself that it's too much bother to think about food.  I can only imagine how much I could have got done in college had I been "paleo"!

JS

Tracy:

I think it's relatively easy to define "healthiness" in terms of "lack of sickness, injury, or other dysfunctionality that leaves one functioning below their potential". 

The problem most people have is that they've never been fully healthy, so they have no basis for subjective comparison -- which is what this article is about.

The problem we have with trying to measure health objectively is that everyone is genetically and environmentally individual, and therefore has a different optimal level of function.  For example, my reflexes are quick, so I test well above average on reaction time...but that doesn't mean my brain is functioning optimally, because I might well have the potential to react even faster!

JS

Paleobird:

The difference between the pre-industrial diet of rural Americans (who most likely worked the land and owned pigs and chickens) and a Paleolithic diet may actually be smaller than the difference between a pre-industrial and modern post-industrial diet.

"sure there were sodas when I was a kid but they were only 6 oz and when the streetcar ride to your job cost a nickel and so did the soda, you didn't drink soda very often unless you were really rich."

In contrast, today a 12-ounce soda costs under a buck and local transit costs $2.

I recall seeing a graph showing the average % of money Americans spent on food decreasing substantially over the last few decades.  This is not because income increased (it's been flat to slightly decreasing), it's because food has become cheaper: people are buying more processed grain products, which are highly subsidized by our government, and less actual food.  Soda is so cheap now because corn production is subsidized so heavily.

Paul:

That's due to the fact that our governments have spent $trillions of dollars/pounds/etc. bailing out big banks for making loans they knew could never be paid back.

If you run a bank or a large corporation and you screw up harder than anyone in the history of the world has ever screwed up, you get bailed out with taxpayer money.  If you're an individual who has somehow kept productive during all of this, and you're just trying to stay afloat, piss off -- we're taking all of your money to bail out the bankers.

JS